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Category: media

From the Wikipedia article: "The illusory truth effect (also known as the truth effect or the illusion-of-truth effect) is the tendency to believe information to be correct after repeated exposure."
This is one explanation of how Facebook's "fake news" functions to change people's minds, not simply confirm their pre-existing biases....

The Prime Directive of Star Trek (or at least the embrace of it) may have evolved out of U.S. ambivalence about Vietnam. It was part of Rodenberry's vision of "progressive humanity".
> The Prime Directive of "Star Trek: TOS" is primarily a way to process America's 1960s misadventure in Vietnam. Would that more generals and chickenhawks dreamed dreams that taught th...

A breakdown of science fiction writers for and against the Vietnam War from June 1968 Galaxy Magazine:
Commentary on the differences:
> Looking backward at the rival camps, we may be puzzled by Pohl's inability to distinguish between either their ideologies or their conflicting roles in modern SF. For the pro-war list reads like a roll call of champions of super-s...

Via @RoxanneShirazi, a quote from Eco: “There are many things I do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxed as if I had read it” (Eco 1977). He calls this the "alibi of photocopies"
On social media, people are often [[More Willing to Share Than Read]] what they share....

Nearly two-thirds of adults in America now get news on social media and a fifth do so often, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, a polling outfit; the numbers continue to grow fast.
Unfortunately, people are often not selecting news, but expressing identification. See [[Identity Headlines]], [[Filter Bubble]]
The this creates might not be all b...

The version of the world presented to us in increasingly a consumer product, aimed to please rather than inform.
Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook’s news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want – which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our...

People are more willing to share a news article on Facebook than actually read it.
According to a new study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, 59 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked: In other words, most people appear to retweet news without ever reading it.
Worse, the study finds that ...

From a 2015 keynote by Mike Caulfield.
The Garden:
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.
The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It...

Related to the Bechdel Test, the Full Story Test asks three questions of news media content:
1. Are our content priorities committing us to be more inclusive and to tell stories that aren’t being told?
2. Are we tracking the diversity of staff, leadership and our board? How do we measure up?
3. Do we regularly measure the diversity of bylines and sources? Do we have...

The Bechdel Test asks whether a work of fiction, typically but not necessarily a film, features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.
The Bechdel Test is named after cartoonist Alison Bechdel. The test first appeared in her comic Dykes to Watch Out For.
Movies that pass the Bechdel Test....